Oust of Control

This Week in Democracy

• President Trump fired the three remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the bipartisan federal agency that helps state and local officials administer elections. In a statement, a White House official said the president was empowered to remove the commissioners by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week that allowed him to fire a member of another federal agency. Rick Hasen, an election law expert, said it’s unclear whether that decision applies to members of the EAC, and that the commissioners could challenge their firings in court.
• The Department of Justice (DOJ) warned election officials in every state that they could face criminal charges if they knowingly leave noncitizens on their state’s voter rolls. Research continually shows that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare and does not impact election outcomes—but even so, the Trump administration is focusing on it to cast doubt on the American election process.

  State officials from both political parties pushed back on the announcement. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a statement that “Arizona election officials have always worked to ensure that only eligible citizens are registered to vote, and we will continue following Arizona law—not directions that come from political rhetoric or intimidation.”

  Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson argued in a social media post that her state was targeted “for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data.”

  ➡️ MORE: What’s Breaking Through About False Claims of Noncitizen Voting

• A second federal judge blocked the U.S. Postal Service from changing its election policies to follow Trump’s March executive order, which ordered the agency to withhold mail ballots from some voters. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.

  ➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Mail Voting

• A federal judge threw out the Justice Department’s demands for personal information about election workers and volunteers who helped administer the 2020 election in Georgia. The department’s demands, made in April via grand jury subpoenas, included names, home addresses, and phone numbers. The judge sided with county officials who argued that handing over the information to the federal government could discourage others from participating in the future.

  Nevertheless, Trump continues to lie without evidence about the 2020 election while directing his administration to devote resources to related investigations. Last week, news broke that the FBI was assigning hundreds of staff to its 2020 investigation.

  ➡️ MORE: What’s Breaking Through About the Trump Administration’s 2020 Election Investigation

• A federal judge in Florida ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to restore four states’ access to an unreliable federal program to verify voters’ citizenship.

  The program—called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)—was originally designed to verify the citizenship status of people applying for benefits like food stamps and Medicaid, but the Trump administration overhauled it last year to check voters’ citizenship. Late last month, a federal judge in Washington ordered DHS to halt use of the program, citing instances in Texas in which the program flagged eligible voters as potential noncitizens. In some cases, its use has resulted in Americans being deregistered to vote.

  ➡️ MORE: About the SAVE program

• Trump denied requests for disaster relief funding from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The states requested the funding—more than $200 million in total—to help recovery efforts related to major snowstorms earlier this year.

  Research by E&E News shows that since returning to office last year, the president has denied a record amount of disaster relief aid to states.

  ➡️ MORE: Americans Don’t Support the President Withholding Funds Allocated to States by Congress

State of the States

In Arizona, the state Supreme Court reinstated a lower court’s ruling that ordered the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to transfer control of the county’s election-related IT system to Justin Heap, the county recorder. The decision reverses a June ruling from a state appeals court.

The county board argued against transferring control of the system to Heap, telling the court that doing so would require significant changes mere weeks before early voting begins in the state.

Former Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell filed a brief in the case earlier this month in support of the board’s arguments. Purcell—who served as the county’s chief election official for nearly 30 years—noted that making changes to the election administration process so close to the beginning of an election risks “voter confusion, administrative error, and damage to public confidence in election outcomes.”